Sunday, March 25, 2012

The advent of social networking sites has made most of us sitting ducks in the real world. But, in the virtual world, each of us are active online, tweeting/facebooking about our daily chores, interests, posting pictures of a recent party we attended, posting pictures to ask friends whether the 'look' suits us, what we are reading and letting the world know what we are upto at every second in our life. SNSes have penetrated into our lives to a point where we are unable to stop it. The urge to constantly update about your activities has become common.

And, then, we have friends who wait for us to update our facebook/ twitter statuses and 'like' them just for the heck of it. If people like your pictures, you are seen as someone Mr/Ms Perfect. And, then we start judging people by looking at their pictures on Facebook. Under this category, there are yahoos who send friend requests to beautiful/attractive/pretty/good-looking girls and ask all sorts of weird questions like "wana do frndship with me/can we be friends/I want to talk to you/Hey, How are you?" And, there are some who POKE these girls. These poker faces who try to strike a conversation with the girl, just by reading her profile information. This is an attempt to act intelligent or act like he knows the subject she is dealing with or the college she belongs to or pretend to know people from her college or workplace. What they don't understand is that they are making a fool out of themselves and the girl is just being nice to them.

And, then there are girls who are even crazier and have a 'Holier than thou' feeling. they think the whole world is smitten by their pictures uploaded online. For them, their looks matter the most in life and impressing a guy is like the biggest achievement in their lives. They have (girl) friends who are exactly like them and then bitch about those same friends on their back to others. And among these, if a guy approaches a girl for something, say help or a favour, the friends (who cannot think straight) begin linking up this friend to the poor guy who is least interested in any of those schmucks.

Even marriages happen on Facebook nowadays. People put up all sorts of pictures of their partners, wanting the whole world to know that they are "happily" married, though 'happily' is very questionable in this case. And then. there are fights on Facebook, twitter.

And then there are SNS fanatics, who think their life is being fucked up big time, they have all the problems in the world and vent it out on social networking sites. In fact, they are the most depressing people on Earth. They vent out their anger on the government, they pick on everyone around them, they don't like their workplace and they crib 24X7. All this on a social networking site and once a person points a finger at them. These SNS fanatics indulge in verbal abuse online, forget their limits, invade one's privacy and scorn them in such a way that the poor person who posted a link/ status on the SNS regrets it. Mind you, in the process, this fanatic thinks he is on top of the world and rules it, when, on the other side, his life is fucked up big time and he cannot get out of virtual world which he assumes as his real world.

While these are some examples of what we are becoming because of the social networking sites, we have forgotten where to draw the line between our personal and virtual lives. Virtual behaviour also matters. It matters because you are under constant public scrutiny and therefore, have to watch what you reveal/say.

10. To have my own column in a newspaper or magazine dedicated to developmental issues

11. To read all the books I have (half of which I haven't touched)

12. To become thin (or at least look thin)

13. To try out clothes I have never tried before

14. To go out with a complete stranger

15. To punch someone in the stomach (This is to put 10 years of my Karata Training to use)

16. To get married to someone I've known for long enough (and not a stranger at all)

17. To party in a pub, meet new gay friends

18. To meet Amartya Sen

19. To meet Chandrababu Naidu

20. To run a school for the orphans

21. To understand what Engineers do

22. To climb the Mount Everest

23. To walk on a beach where there are no people and dream (Just me)

24. To tell "pseudo journalists" not to ruin the profession anymore

25. To have a pet dog

26. To drive a Jeep and a truck

27. To be out of contact with everyone for a year

28. To disassociate myself with caste and religion

29. To see a caste-less India

30. To burn all the hooligans, who in the name of a Bandh, burn buses and create trouble

31. To fly an airplane

32. To see Hockey or Football take over Cricket's popularity in India

33. To travel in a Cruise to a foreign country

34. To do bungee jumping
35. To go sky diving

36. To hold a snake

37. To become a Vendetta for a day (like "V" in the move V for Vendetta)

38. To study anything related to human rights/gender issues/child rights39. To stop thinking for a day
40. To write a Sports story
41. To get on to a stage at a concert and sing like no one's watching
42. To visit every state in India
43. To watch the Olympic Games
44. To have a house with my own farm in it
45. To go Scuba Diving
46. To Trend on Twitter
47. To Take a tour of the White House and read the President's Book of Secrets, written by every American President to the next
48. To learn to play a musical instrument
49. To visit Antarctica
50. To work at The Hindu and do development stories

there's more to come...the list is subject to change at any point of time

About Me

A self-consciously simple woman, a journalist who loves writing on any issue related to human rights. I love probing further to get to the core of the issues I confront. Empathy and concern for weaker sections of the society helps me write my stories with passion and insight. Winner of the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity 2013 for the Southern Region. This apart, a naturalist, an ambivert and a humane human.